Transportation systems that exist in most cities often provide transportation schedules for their buses, trams, trains, trolleys or other public transportation systems. The time schedule published by a transportation system provider provides a schedule indicating arrival and departure times of vehicles for the various transportation system routes. Sometimes a transportation system route may be called a transportation line. Even in the best of conditions, it can be difficult for a transportation vehicle operator to maintain the written schedule, particularly during peak traffic times, for reasons such a traffic conditions, weather conditions, passenger load and vehicle malfunctions. Furthermore, no matter how close a bus driver or vehicle operator is able to maintain the written schedule, a passenger who uses the public transit system or a particular transit line infrequently, or perhaps a passenger from outside of the transit area in which the particular transit vehicle operates, is unlikely to have a schedule readily available and know what the expected transit schedule arrival and departure times for each destination should be.
A passenger waiting at a transit stop for a transit vehicle does not know when the next transit vehicle will arrive at the particular stop. For example, if a passenger arrives at a particular stop a minute before the scheduled arrival time, and the transit vehicle does not arrive at the scheduled time, the passenger does not know if he arrived before or after the scheduled time and further does not know whether the transit vehicle will arrive at that particular stop at all. This consumes a passenger's time, which essentially extends the duration of what may already be a long journey in inclement weather. Such time may have been better spent by the passenger doing something else rather than waiting for the next transit vehicle. If a passenger uses a commuter bus at peak hours, a waiting passenger may be relatively certain that a vehicle will arrive on or almost on time, but if the passenger could determine if the bus was going to be late, the passenger could have stayed at their office or perform additional work prior to walking to the bus station to wait for a bus that is going to be late. Furthermore, if a passenger wants to make a transfer from one transit line to a second transit line, it would be advantageous for the passenger to know if the transit line thereon will arrive at a transfer stop in time for the transit vehicle on the second line to pick them up.
Additionally, an enormous amount of effort and man hours go in to determining a bus route schedule that includes arrival and departure times for each stop on a transit line. After determining the arrival and departure times for each stop on a transit line, these arrival and departure times must be entered by a person into a database. A database may even be used or loaded into a transit vehicle's electronics so as to inform the driver as well as the passengers, via display signs, the transit line or route number, the next stop (e.g., market street), and the expected arrival time at the next stop. If a bus is operating behind schedule, these times may not be properly adjusted to coincide with the transit vehicles actual arrival and departure times for the transit stops. Such a situation adds additional confusion to the passengers riding on or waiting for a transit vehicle and further may add stress to the transit vehicle operator or a bus driver due to the knowledge that they are running behind schedule and perhaps creating additional hardships for passengers who are attempting to transfer from one transit line to another.
What is needed is a real-time, self-learning transit stop schedule creation system and method that learns and stores transit stop arrival and departure times so as to create a flexible estimated schedule that may be electronically distributed to transit system users in real or near real time as well as displayed to transit system passengers on the bus or transit vehicle and other locations in order to help eliminate the drawbacks of the prior human inputted hard schedule that a transit vehicle driver is constantly attempting to meet regardless of the traffic conditions, weather, passenger load, day of the week or other variables that effect the timeliness of a transit vehicle's arrival and departure time at each stop on its particular transit route or line.